


Colour Wheel

by Lokifan



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Growing Up, M/M, characterisation through hair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-15
Updated: 2013-02-15
Packaged: 2017-11-29 08:58:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/685173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lokifan/pseuds/Lokifan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All adolescents’ appearances change dramatically, but Nymphadora Tonks took the cake.</p>
<p>Warning: v brief animal cruelty</p>
            </blockquote>





	Colour Wheel

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for dora_the_nymph, as her gift ficlet for Crucio.

All adolescents’ appearances change dramatically through the years between eleven and eighteen, but Nymphadora Tonks took the cake.

When she arrived at Hogwarts, peering down at the lake over the edge of the little boat and wondering if she’d see mermaids, she had eyes round and dark as buttons and a pale, heart-shaped face like her mum’s. The liquid child’s eyes already showed signs of the dark flash that Bellatrix had used to fell teenage boys with a look.

Then she was sorted Hufflepuff. Dora smiled as the hat was taken off her and she tripped her way to the table in yellow. 

The others in her house were a bit anxious about her Slytherin heritage, and the dark, dramatic looks to which she was a natural heir. Dora’s hair lightened throughout her first year. When she returned, her newly-rounded face was framed by blonde pigtails. She looked like a classic Hufflepuff: unthreatening and cuddly as the threadbare teddy she’d stashed at the bottom of her trunk.

That changed at thirteen. She liked her House, and would never be ashamed of it; but she was bored with the Hufflepuff look. Over the summer before her third year she stopped changing her face from its natural contours, and turned her hair shocking scarlet. Vicky Chalmers dyed her hair peroxide blonde, and they sat together in Transfiguration: a blaze of colour and giggles. 

A few weeks later, she tried out for the Quidditch team. She was a capable Beater: her hand-eye co-ordination wasn’t the best but when she hit a Bludger she sent it thwacking all the way across the pitch. In the last practice before their February game against Gryffindor, she hit their Captain on the side of the head.

For a moment Dora was afraid she’d killed her. Then Betty was on her feet, shaking her head like a wet dog and grinning. “My ears are ringing,” she said. “Get Weasley with a hit like that and we’ve won!”

Dora rushed about all game, swinging and swearing with no time to stare. But afterwards Charlie caught her eye and smiled at her from under his wet red fringe. Her stomached swooped like she was still flying.

She changed her hair swiftly after that: she couldn’t imagine a Weasley being attracted to someone with vivid red hair. And even if Charlie _could_ be –

“Let’s face it, purebloods – especially Blacks – have enough of a reputation for incest as it is without adding fuel to the fire.” She was sitting cross-legged on her bed with a mirror, experimenting with colour and shade.

“Mmm,” said Vicky, watching her hair. “Go back to the deep brown, I liked that.” 

Dora agreed, and lengthened her hair until it flowed halfway down her back. It was a bit of a pain to tie up before Quidditch practice, but she could flick it about sometimes, giggling with Vicky and Abby. Besides, the older boys flirted with her now she’d got breasts, and it was nice to have a shield. She was meant to be a ferocious Beater; she couldn’t let them catch her in a blush.

By Christmas in her fourth year, the boys had a better chance of making a rhinoceros blush. She and Vicky were on a mission to prove that ‘Hufflepuff girl’ didn’t have to mean ‘shy, giggly virgin in a woolly jumper’. Tonks wasn’t going to be wet over Charlie, either.

Her fifteenth birthday party went with a bang. Multiple bangs, in fact: she and Vicky set off fireworks in the common room and set her birthday banner on fire. 

The flames burnt the ropes holding it up to cinders and the flaming banner fluttered to the floor. Half-drunk teenagers stampeded backwards to avoid it, screeching. 

Tonks controlled the urge to panic, drew her wand and shouted “Aguamenti!”

The smell lingered throughout the night, but Tonks and Vicky danced on the smouldering remains of the banner, sharing a bottle of Firewhiskey and howling along to Life on Mars. Tonks’ trainers crushed the blackened cloth into the carpet as she danced, her short skirt bouncing around her thighs. By the end of the party she was off her face, her eyeliner had melted into warrior streaks and her brown hair was a birds’ nest. It was a great party.

Thus began eighteen months of juvenile delinquency. Vicky cut her blonde hair off round her cheekbones, giving herself a heavy bob, and Tonks grew her hair still longer and kept it midnight black. She wore a long coat throughout the summer after fourth year: not to look cool, but because when her father saw the shortness of her scarlet skirts as she Flood to meet Vicky it made him look sad.

That summer she met Benjamin Lotts at a Weird Sisters gig. He was a scruffy Ravenclaw with a husky voice half-wrecked with cigarettes. He gave her a dark-eyed, heavy-lidded look and she returned it boldly. His face broke into a slight smile, and by the end of the night her mouth was tingling and tasted like ash.

Ben joined her and Vicky for an August spent traipsing around Diagon Alley, smoking and giggling and talking about nothing into the long summer nights. Their Hogwarts letters arrived.

“I’m not a prefect. Sinastra put a note to my mum in saying I ‘lack self-control’!” Tonks snorted. “Nobody controls themself the way I do!” She turned her hair purple to demonstrate.

“Ugh, school again. Let’s burn the letters!” said Vicky.

“Pyromaniac,” Tonks teased. They put their letters together in a little pile, and Ben lit a match. The smell of burning parchment in the orange light of evening was Tonks’ abiding memory of that summer: that, and the way Ben seized her mouth.

He wasn’t as good at kissing as he thought he was: he seemed to have an idea that roughness translated to passion and he squeezed her breasts in a way which wasn’t very nice, really. Still, he blushed sometimes when she smiled at him and they sat in his dorm, on return to Hogwarts, and listened to the wireless and snuck out to get drunk in Hogsmeade’s graveyard. She liked his Bad Boy image; it went well with her belly-baring tops and black hair.

Then one day she found him inflicting cigarette burns on a Niffler, and abruptly decided bad boys weren’t for her.

He probably made the equivalent decision based on the varied curses she hurled down.

Charlie Weasley turned scarlet when she told him what had happened. She quickly grabbed his arms, and he stopped – though the thick muscle of his biceps said he could have walked off with her dragging him back and never noticed.

“I already hexed him into nothing, Weasley. Right now I need you to help me look after the Niffler.”

Charlie paused, then blew air upwards, lifting his fringe. “All right.” She held the Niffler still for him while he cast diagnosis spells. It wriggled and scratched but she never flinched.

She told him about the curses she’d cast on Ben and Charlie laughed, the sound rich and rolling through her stomach like she’d swallowed thick chocolate sauce. She named the Niffler Fireball, after one of Charlie’s favourite dragons.

She had to shorten her hair because Fireball kept trying to chew it. But Charlie came round regularly to check on the patient, and she thought it was worth it.

Tonks buckled down to work again now, because OWLs were coming up, and NEWTs after that. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do yet. Charlie wanted to work with dragons, he was doing work experience in Romania, he had it all sorted out. Apparently Oliver Wood had cried when he found out Charlie didn’t want to play Quidditch.

In sixth year she and Charlie kissed sometimes, their hands brushing over Fireball’s soft fur, and she decided to be an Auror.

She liked fighting, cursing the bad guys, and using her brain. She thought she could do the job. She reassured herself of this repeatedly, and Vicky agreed. Vicky wanted to work in the Hog’s Head but she was supportive.

Tonks still worried, and she turned her hair purple to show she wasn’t joining the Man. Mad-eye Moody gave it the stink-eye but he let her do work experience after sixth year. After that, she didn’t have to reassure herself any more. 

She liked Quidditch, but she didn’t want it for a career. The game was more fun than ever these days, now she could imagine playing against Charlie, laughing and swapping taunts. But Quidditch wasn’t for her, because when Hufflepuff beat Gryffindor in her last year – finally – she only remembered kissing him in the broom shed afterwards. How Charlie’s big hands had settled on her waist, before one slipped down into her knickers. She’d moaned, spread her legs so he could do it easily. He’d been gentle, slipping two fingers inside her and flickering a round thumb over her clit until she came, clutching at his shoulders and the wall, groaning into his chest, her thighs clenching round his hand, her cunt fluttering round his fingers.

She’d beamed up at him afterwards, cheery as ever, and invited his red-faced handsomeness to a night he’d never forget.

Tonks turned her hair pink to celebrate the victory: it was her favourite colour.


End file.
